Conversation with A DevOps/OpsDev Engineer — Part I

Good conversation is as stimulating as black coffee, and just as hard to sleep after.

Last week, I got a chance to connect with one of my old friend and the technologist. Because of our common interest I started asking him few personal interest and technical questions of our common field or technology. I found his answers very informative and inspirational that’s why I have decided to share the same with you people.

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Before sharing our conversation details, let me introduced him with you all. Anmol Sharma (aka Annie), an engineer by passion & profession, an enthusiastic learner by life. He is fond of basic skills like communication, learning through various modes and experiences, friendly relationships, food & health, adaptiveness, and leadership that cares. He don’t understand absolutes like best or worst, for him everything lies in a range depending upon perspective, that keeps changing. Lets start asking questions to him now.

Me: Name the technologies are you working on?

Annie: Technologies hmm.. here are few of them:

Monolithic on VMs to Microservices in containers and now to Serverless functions.

Backend programming & CICD pipelines.

Communication & People skills.

Food science, exercise physiology, emotional awareness, pragmatic relationships.

Me: What is DevOps definition according to you ?

Annie: DevOps responsibilities can split into 3, which are:

Site Reliability

Release

Monitoring & Observability Engineering

For me being DevOps is a mindset. Working in startups gave me the luxury & liberty of virtually having no boundaries. I've experienced bare-metal and cloud servers, SQL & no-SQL databases, scaling and high availability, core engineering & automation, security & compliance, monitoring & observability, product development, SEO, sales & marketing, customer support, handling difficult situations at the workplace, empathy & leadership. To an engineer starting out a professional career, I always recommend to join a startup.

Me: How difficult or easy to adopt a DevOps culture ? Give a few examples for Startups, SME and MNCs.

Annie: In startups you are the driver of DevOps as a culture. You are required to experiment, learn and adapt. You can simply build your entire personality out of it. People starting out of a startup are more open, flexible, fearless & experimental. In startups I fail fast and grow fast. You can call me a startup advocate for now.

I’ve no experience of working at biggies - but I definitely want to. But I’ve worked with people from MNC’s and there is always something to learn from them. At worst - what to avoid?, and at best - what to do? Their engineering practices & decision making culture is going to be a major factor for me to decide on whom I would like to work with.

Me: What’s the future — DevOps, DevSecOps or NoOps ? Elaborate it.

Annie: Like I said, DevOps is a mindset characterized by change. Definitely doing repetitive work, without innovation gives no joy. It keeps evolving.

Likewise DevSecOps is just another term coined to indicate security is going to be an important trait in the days of growing internet & online economy.

NoOps is a joke - only the way we conduct it is changing. What we did then, is now being done differently. For example - earlier the majority of NOC engineers were only watching the Nagios screens and firing an incident, these days that job is better handled by Monitoring systems and with advent of AI/ML it is going to get better. “NoOps” is only useful in presentations to attract attention, but conclusively all are saying “either upgrade or become irrelevant”. The same is applicable for development. Writing the code is not as same as it used to be 10 years ago. Applications are more demanding these days, and it requires developers to keep upgrading the style of writing the code. Moreover, in future the majority of applications will be based upon data driven intelligence, the code will only be a small segment to it. Yet we do not hear “NoDev”.

Me: What’s the importance of Automation in DevOps culture?

Annie: Humans as species are evolving, and those who don’t will soon become irrelevant. Automation is the core principle of DevOps. You can survive for a few more years but can’t stay relevant without it. Start developing something useful, not necessarily from scratch.

Me: What’s your opinion on Open source tools Vs Cloud provided Managed services for DevOps?

Annie: They complement each other. A lot of managed cloud services are based on and forked from open source projects. Open source is the heart of modern day engineering. You can choose to stay closed but in the long run you will definitely be beaten up by the community. Millennial generation is full of these examples like Android vs Others, Kubernetes vs Others (like AWS ECS). Undoubtedly inclusive effort from the community (aka open source) will lead to unprecedented growth and it requires no advocacy.

And with that, we started talking on our old college time memories. I really enjoyed talking with him and of course learnt few basic concepts around DevOps and Cloud. Hope you will also like it !!

Please feel free to write at piyush.jalan93@gmail.com for any queries and stay tuned for more talk with different technologies experts.

Thanks